“Are we paying reparations to avoid the conversation?”
In the old days to be ripped from community (karetKaret refers to many punishments, especially expulsion from one’s people. More) was the harshest punishment imaginable to our people. Some of us feel we are living this punishment in a new packaging. We feel alone, secretly searching for a sense of belonging in a post-Shoah society.
The unexpressed message of reparations is that if you were poor before the ShoahIn Hebrew, Shoah means ‘catastrophe’. There are many words Jews and other persecuted groups use for what is commonly called the Holocaust. Yiddish speakers often use the term Ḥurban, which is also used for the destruction of the second temple and the expulsion from Jerusalem. The International Romani Union uses the term ‘samudaripen’, which means ‘mass killing’. Holocaust once meant a burnt sacrifice to a god. More, you deserve poverty after. If you were wealthy before the war, you deserve wealth after.
We didn’t all own art or homes or jewelry. We were robbed of more than money and property. In fact, those were the least of our losses. Our lives were more complex than reparations allow.
We had lives that were observant, secular, political, and complicated. We had labor unions, schools, and synagogues. We were alive.
It is achingly lonely to walk in our streets where the markers of a once vibrant Jewish life – bakery, fish shop, café – are missing, while we are craving connection to that heritage.